One Blue Moon by Catrin Collier

seemed to be leaning on the bar, glass in hand, watching the world go by. Alma didn’t mind. Not even when he refused to take her to the few annual dances that still went on after the café closed for the evening. When all was said and done, they saw one another six nights a week. What other couple could say that? And if he hadn’t publicly acknowledged their relationship, so what? It would only be a matter of time. He simply wasn’t given to gushing displays of sentimentality or affection, that was all. Besides, the words ‘I love you’ were the most overworked in the English language. They didn’t mean anything: not when glib, flashy Romeos who fancied themselves as ladykillers used them over and over again. Men like Glan Richards, who murmured them to any girl foolish enough to go to the pictures with him, only to use the same phrase the next night, when he moved on to the next gullible female. She didn’t need Ronnie to make any declarations of love to her. He showed her in so many ways other than words. Besides, what more could she ask of him? When they were alone ...
    ‘Ready then?’
    She looked up and smiled. ‘Ready for what?’ she asked innocently, knowing full well what was coming.
    ‘Upstairs, woman. Now!’ He patted her behind. ‘Then if you’re good I just might take you home.’
    ‘Via the mountain?’ she asked hopefully.
    ‘What for?’
    ‘Look at the scenery?’
    ‘It’s raining. There’s nothing to see.’
    ‘It might clear up. ‘
    ‘Even if it does, there’ll only be slagheaps lit by the moon and the stars,’ he teased, a deadpan expression on his face.
    ‘Men!’ she exclaimed disparagingly. But his lack of romance didn’t prevent her from running up the back stairs to the small bedroom that he’d furnished for the nights when he told his parents he was too tired, or as they privately believed, too drunk to drive the Trojan home.
    Ronnie ran his hand through his Vaselined, slicked-back hair and glanced at his profile in the huge mirror that hung on the back wall behind the counter. Smiling broadly, he studied his teeth. Satisfied with what he saw, he checked around the café one last time before stuffing the contents of the till into a cloth cash bag. He pushed it into one of the capacious pockets of the loose-cut khaki jacket he kept for work. Pulling down the door blind, he tried the lock on the front door to make sure it was fastened, switched out the back lights and followed Alma.
    He knew she would be undressed, ready and waiting for him between the sheets of the small single bed. If he’d ever stopped to think about their relationship he might have realised just how much he took her for granted. Almost as much as he took every other female in his life for granted, including his mother and his sisters. Used to being one of the family’s breadwinners from an early age, the responsibility had made him, if not callous, then at least indifferent to their needs and desires. Without thinking, he tended to treat those dependent on him like children. Beings to be petted when they were good, chastised when they were not, and to be kept in the dark about his private thoughts and any problems he might have, lest the need to confide in someone be misinterpreted as weakness.
    Alma was undoubtedly the prettiest, brightest and longest lasting of his many girlfriends, but he had never allowed her to be the only woman in his life. Their physical relationship, satisfying as he found it, didn’t prevent him from paying regular visits to a shy little widow in Rickards Street. Not to mention Molly the flower and peg seller who had a stall on the market, Lucy the usherette who worked in the New Theatre ... Ronnie, like all Italian men of his class, saw unblemished virtue, abstinence and chastity as an integral part of the make-up of every decent woman. A vital and essential attribute in his sisters, his mother, and the woman he would eventually marry; but something he, his father and his